Monday, March 30, 2009

Sign of the times?

I typed in "what is a..." and in the Google suggestion drop down list, I got:

  • a good credit score
  • a ponzi scheme
  • a hedge fund
  • a short sale
  • a torrent
  • a recession
All of these except 'torrent' are related to the current financial crisis. Google says that the suggestion list is basically generated based on "the spirit of times." Here is what they say on their website:
Google Suggest uses data about the overall popularity of various searches to help rank the refinements it offers.

Thursday, March 26, 2009

Marijuana will be the top issue in online POTUS town hall today



A huge number of the questions submitted by the public via this highly sophisticated, tech savvy website were on marijuana in the 2 days we had to submit our questions for the online town hall starting in 2 hours. Around 40, 000 questions of the total 104,000 questions submitted were on the drug that many liberal Dems want legalized. Pretty much all of these 40,000 were in support of legalizing it based on my own personal estimate.

We know very well that President Obama is opposed to legalizing to marijuana as he said during his campaign trail, but I think this online town hall will be very interesting to watch Potus respond to the overwhelming support. Since it is the top issue, he can not avoid this question. So I guarantee you that he will answer this question unless he is fine with turning down ~35% of the participants.

UPDATE: POTUS blew off marijuana advocates by laughing the question away and suggesting it may have something to do with the online community. While I'm not quite a marijuana advocate, I thought it was unfair of President Obama to not respond with a rational opposition to legalizing the drug.